I once worked under a Chief Executive who habitually used that cliché. I still cringe whenever I hear it. You know what it means, don't you? That person is going to show you that ''big picture'' that is important to them, but that you won't really care for.

Our C.E. had been brought in as an interim officer assigned to facilitate a massive company-wide corporate restructure. The problem was that he'd been experienced in selling a different product and had no familiarity with ours. We had an entirely different business that required specialized marketing. Unfortunately, he was a "consultant" out of his depth.

His constant assurance that if we took a helicopter ride with him we would see where he was coming from made him infamous. Whenever someone asked where he was, the other person's eyes would slowly glance upwards. And whenever we heard a helicopter hovering above our building, we wondered whether he was....well, you know.

Anyhow, after all that I want to take you for a helicopter ride with me. I'm not a consultant and complex details perplex me unless I have hard data. But I know someone who has given us the Big Picture.

First of all, Israel turned 66 this week and that's a bona fide miracle. Israel ceased to exist as a nation some 1,900+ years ago. Throughout the centuries its tribes were dispersed, treated with contempt, mercilessly hunted and threatened with extinction. Against all odds they survived.

On this day [May 6th] in 1948, one of the greatest anticipated prophecies of the Bible was fulfilled. Isaiah 66:8 rhetorically asks, "Can a land be born in one day. Can a nation be brought forth all at once?" We now know from history that the answer is "yes."... Never in the history of mankind has a nation been removed from its land and yet restored to that very same land 2000 years later with its own unique culture, religion, and language all intact!

"Indeed, few Americans know how close the U.S. government came to refusing to support the establishment of the State of Israel in May of 1948. Few realize that most of President Truman’s advisors were dead set against the Jewish state, despite the horrors of the Holocaust, and that even many American Jews didn’t support the re-creation of Israel."

As the fortuitous nature of the times had it, Truman - a Bible believing Christian - was a significant factor in swaying the opposition to a new nation for the Jews. Rosenberg cites Clark Clifford who was an advisor to President Truman:

“[Truman] was a student and believer in the Bible since his youth. From his reading of the Old Testament he felt the Jews derived a legitimate historical right to Palestine, and he sometimes cited such biblical lines as Deuteronomy 1:8..."

Anti-Zionists imagine that modern Israel was a product of Zionist political manipulations. They would protest that: "Zionists got into Truman's ear" or "They arranged the Arab-Israel conflict with Armageddon in mind."

Yet, in the 19th century, a number of theologians anticipated the resurrection of Israel as a nation, purely because the Bible said so. These included people such as J. C. Ryle, the Bonar brothers, George N. H. Peters, Joseph Seiss and others. They looked at passages such as Jeremiah 31:31-37 & Amos 9:14-15 and took them at face-value.

Zionists couldn't have foisted Deut 28:37 onto the world. Hatred on the Jews is a phenomenon that precedes modern Zionism by centuries. It is eminently ironic that those who irrationally vilify Israel, or deny its right to exist, and those who hate Jews are, in fact, fulfilling Deut 28:37.

We are currently seeing hundreds of Nigerian girls kidnapped by Boko Haram in order to sell as slaves in the name of Allah. Yet this event was largely ignored by activists who opted to use the opportunity of Israel's 66th Birthday to malign it. I can only describe this as obscene and evil.

Dennis Prager gave us a piece of the Big Picture when he observed of the Middle East conflict that: "One side wants the other dead...and if it didn't there would be peace." It's not hard to grasp and you don't need a helicopter to see it.

God said Israel would not cease to exist as a nation forever and that it would suffer as a consequence of straying from its relationship with Him. That's what we see today. No Zionist pressure forced Israel's Arab neighbors to attack it in 1948, long before it had a chance to become an "apartheid State". And no Zionist helped to miraculously preserve it in subsequent attacks.

Some forty years ago Hal Lindsey predicted that Russia would emerge as a significant protagonist along with Iran. Then the iron curtain fell and the eighties went by without so much as a whimper. Someone even wrote a dissertation mocking Lindsey and those Armageddon-loving premillennialists.

The author's case was driven by his opinion. Hal accessed his information from the Bible even though his timing was premature.

So now we see Putin leaving his boot marks all over Eastern Europe while selling arms to Iran. In turn, Iran is striving for nuclear weapons and has repeatedly called for the extinction of Israel. Iran also enables Syria, who enables Hezbollah, who are the sworn enemies of Israel.

America is becoming a byword insofar as influencing international outcomes. We're now seeing Europe forced to rise and take an initiative in dealing with Iran's nuclear aspirations. Even so, there's little doubt that Iran will succeed.

Hal was right.

So let's quickly recap: A nation that was once dead has been miraculously resurrected. It survived a number of attacks and immense odds against its survival. For some otherwise inexplicable reason, its surrounding nations want to destroy it and others conspire against it. The protagonists are behaving as the Bible predicted.

Moreover, all this was prophesied to occur just before the Christ's Second Advent (Zechariah 14:1-4; Hosea 5:15; Matthew 23:39). Scoffers will be tempted to allegorize these verses but one cannot ignore the signs of the times, nor Israel.